On rare occasions, you may accidentally delete something from your Knowledge Base or lose content due to a hardware or software error, such as a power failure, a corrupted hard disk, an operating system error, or a bug in RemNote. To reduce the risk of permanently losing your notes, RemNote automatically takes backups in many cases and provides a way to restore them.

If you've lost some bullet but aren't sure if you need to restore a backup specifically, try the quick steps in Help! I deleted my notes or they've gone missing! first.

Backups are generated automatically and can come from several sources.

Our cloud servers automatically store a backup of your Synced Knowledge Base every day unless it has not changed since the previous day's backup. All Daily Backups are retained for at least 60 days, unless you delete your RemNote account. (Backups older than this will likely be available as well, but only some of them will be retained and the details of which ones are retained may change from time to time.)

You can download a Daily Backup by going to Settings > Backups and then selecting the date of the backup you want.

If you are using the desktop app, you will have local backups available for your knowledge bases on your computer. Go to Settings > Backups > Local Backups to open the backup folder with View Local Backups, to take a backup on the spot with Make Backup Now, or to change how many backups RemNote keeps and how much space they are allowed to use (see Managing the space backups use on your hard drive, further down).

Both Synced and Local Knowledge Bases generate local backups.

Local backups are stored on your computer's hard drive, in the backups subfolder of a folder which you can find at the Local Storage Location displayed in your Knowledge Base's settings (click on the name of your KB under the “Knowledge Base” heading in settings to get here). Each backup is a .db.zip file, and the date in the filename tells you when it was taken.

Along with your daily backups, RemNote also keeps copies of all files you’ve uploaded (such as images, PDFs, and audio files) on your hard drive. These files can be found in the ‎files subfolder within the same folder as your backups.

Additionally, you can also open your KB's local folder from the KB that's currently open in your app by going to Settings > Troubleshooting > Locate .db file.

If you've manually backed up your knowledge base recently (see Making a manual backup, further down), you can also restore from that backup.

Once you've found a backup, you'll want to restore it. The procedure will differ somewhat depending on what you've lost.

If there's nothing left in your Knowledge Base that you want to keep:

If your Knowledge Base is mostly fine, but you've accidentally deleted or lost some specific bullets that you weren't able to restore from the Trash, then you can import a complete backup into a new Local Knowledge Base and retrieve the specific bullets that you need to restore from it.

Sometimes you might not be sure when you lost your data, so you may need to check several backups to find a version that contains what you've lost and is still reasonably up to date.

If you went to transfer the data in a Local Knowledge Base to a different computer or if you're feeling particularly paranoid, you can export your entire KB in the RemNote format by choosing Settings > Export. Then select the Knowledge Base you want to backup, set the Format to Full RemNote (Complete), and click the Export button.

This backup includes everything in your KB except:

The backup can later be restored using any of the methods described above in Restoring a backup.

RemNote keeps a complete copy of your knowledge base on your own device, along with your backups and every file you've uploaded, so the RemNote folder can grow to take a significant amount of space over time. If you're running short on disk space, it helps to know what's in that folder before you start deleting things.

Inside each knowledge base's folder (the Local Storage Location in your Knowledge Base's settings) you'll find:

Deleting old .db.zip files from the backups folder by hand is safe, but we recommend changing your retention settings instead. Deleting files by hand frees space only once, and RemNote will gradually fill the folder up again as it takes new backups, whereas lowering the retention settings keeps it small from now on.

Go to Settings > Backups > Local Backups, and lower any of the Local Desktop Backup Retention settings:

Then click Save.

Two things are worth knowing about these settings:

If you're using a Synced Knowledge Base, removing local backups doesn't affect your cloud Daily Backups, which are stored on our servers and are still available from Settings > Backups.

The files folder is often the largest part of your RemNote folder, especially if you've uploaded a lot of PDFs or images. Note that it keeps a copy of everything you've ever uploaded, including files you've since deleted from your notes, so it can be much bigger than you'd expect.

It's tempting to sort this folder by size and delete the biggest items, but we don't recommend it. RemNote can't currently show you which files are still referenced somewhere in your notes, so there's no reliable way to confirm that a file is genuinely unused, and deleting one that's still in use will leave a broken image or an unopenable PDF behind. If you decide to clear some out anyway, we recommend copying the entire Files folder to an external drive or cloud folder first, so you can restore anything you end up needing.